Happy 25th Anniversary to The Sundays’ third & final studio album Static & Silence, originally released September 22, 1997.
In 1997, after a five-year hiatus, the Sundays released a video for their single “Summertime,” which depicted the band performing in a room whose walls were covered in ripe, glistening, colorful fruits and vegetables, while Harriet Wheeler, the Sundays’ singer, channeled a ’90s Audrey Hepburn in a simple black sheath dress and her usual artfully messy updo. Wheeler and guitarist David Gavurin (also her husband) went on MTV to promote it, and submitted to an awkward interview where they were presented with crudité (no doubt in the spirit of the video), and nibbled at baby carrots while answering questions they clearly didn’t want to be asked.
“It’s very summery,” the veejay observed. “The question that sort of comes to my mind is why wasn’t it released in the summertime?”
“I think that’s too literal,” Gavurin answered gamely. “You’re taking it too literally.”
It was characteristic of most of their scant appearances since their 1990 debut Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, on which they famously declared, “People I know, places I go / Make me feel tongue-tied.” During the seven years that they churned out three albums in the ’90s before they completely disappeared, the Sundays created a soundtrack for people who were socially awkward, or at least socially fatigued, and, along with Gavurin’s dreamy, textured guitars in the spirit of Johnny Marr, it’s why they often drew comparisons to those other Brits, The Smiths. So, of course they were going to release an album with a summery theme at the official start of Fall.
When Brits of this ilk sing about summertime it hits differently than, say, when the Beach Boys sing about summertime. There’s no Technicolor sunniness, no gently swaying palms, no azure skies, no uncomplicated flings that conclude neatly at summer’s end. “In our lyrics, we’re trying to talk about the fact that, for us at least, there’s a lot of confusion around,” Gavurin said during another rare interview with ABC News. “That’s not necessarily a bad thing, that just sort of seems to be a vaguely human way of getting through the day. You’re flitting around from the most trivial thought to maybe a deeper, larger metaphysical thought.”
The Sundays singing about summertime infused the whole thing with irony, or with melancholy, or maybe even with a literary type of complexity. That’s the kind of summer I was having—or at least it felt that way then—when my friend Kara brought Static & Silence with her on her visit to Germany the following summer, in 1998. I now think of it as the Sleepless Summer, because I had developed a nasty bout of insomnia after a difficult first year at college. The Sundays even had an answer for that: “Lying awake, dead of night / and eyes that never close,” Wheeler sings airily on Static & Silence’s sixth track “I Can’t Wait.”
My high-school friend Shana had been the one to first introduce me to the Sundays, with 1992’s Blind. Shana had a big, dysfunctional family and lived in tight Army family quarters, and so she understood the importance of bedroom music, the kind you listen to when you close the door to your bedroom and escape the whole world. I soon went back and bought 1990’s Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, but I somehow missed Static & Silence years later when it first came out that autumn of ’97, most likely because that first year at college in the states, I was wrapped up in buying old ’80s records and other stuff my new friend Joseph was recommending.
Listen to the album:
Joseph (not Joe) was a college freshman like me, but a “nontraditional student” 10 years my senior. Somehow we were enrolled in almost all of the same classes, and he immediately seemed like my kind of weirdo—lanky, milky-white, with an all-black wardrobe, looking uncannily like the anemic/vampiric members of The Jesus and Mary Chain. So, we fell into a natural friendship despite, or maybe because of, the age difference. Joseph had come of age in New York in the ’80s, and he had this whole back catalogue of odd, esoteric music I had never heard of, along with an appreciation for ‘90s bands—Polvo, Sebadoh, Pavement—that I hadn’t initially gotten into.
Everyone else at college seemed so young, and had horrible taste in music (the late ’90s had become a faux “alternative” wasteland), blasting Chumbawamba, Third Eye Blind, Marcy Playground and all sorts of other bullshit all hours of the day. They’d also get blackout puke drunk and blast their bullshit at all hours of the night. Hence my insomnia. And when my dorm mates weren’t getting wasted and listening to shitty music, they were going home every other weekend, dragging along the stuffed animals they stacked on their beds in the dorm, so that their mommies could cook their favorite meals and do their laundry.
It didn’t help that I had taken a gap year between high school and college, traveling all over Europe without my mommy, or anyone else’s for that matter. Or that I had grown up on an American army base in Germany, where the kids were tough and moved a lot and had to make new friends all the time, and so homesickness was a luxury no one could afford. Or that the drinking age in Germany was 16, and getting blackout drunk wasn’t some cute way of claiming independence or sophistication. Still, I envied my classmates’ ability to go home whenever they felt like it. One day, I walked past the Study Abroad office on my way to a class and burst into tears at the photos of German half-timbered houses and the tower of Pisa and the beaches of Spain that someone had arranged on one of the bulletin boards. It was a reminder of the lonely, aching feeling that I didn’t fit.
By the time Kara came to visit me in Germany during my first summer back home from college, I was wrung out. But she had Static & Silence with her—the ultimate sad-summer bedroom music—and that sort of saved me. I’d lie in bed and listen to it in on my headphones in my old bedroom while the rest of the house was already deep asleep, and by the time the last song, “Monochrome,” came on, I’d be drifting off (“It’s 4 in the morning, July in 1969 / Me and my sister, we crept down like shadows / They’re bringing the moon right down to our sitting room / Static and silence, and a monochrome vision”). The song was about the Apollo 11 moon landing, represented on the album’s cover by a sharp photo of the looming blue moon against matching cerulean—an attraction so fixed and wonderous you could gaze upon it from anywhere in the world.
The entire album has a similar crystal-clear, suspended-in-time quality to it, where past and present and even locale are fused together, the way a summer can stick in your mind and become indistinguishable from a more general, abstract vision of “summertime.” I had had to work that summer—I was attending a private university and my parents weren’t rich—and so I’d gotten a job at the Shopette on base, which sometimes entailed dull nights on the graveyard shift. I’d squint under the flickering fluorescent lights, ringing up young soldiers’ six packs and condoms and snack foods and energy drinks. But there were other nights that were magical, breaking into outdoor pools with old friends and swimming in the quiet dark, going to Schaum parties and dancing through the foam to cheesy German techno, hanging out with an old crush until closing at a pub. The way “summer” was and is supposed to be.
“And it’s you and me in the summertime / We’ll be hand in hand down in the park / With a squeeze and a sigh and a twinkle in your eye / And all the sunshine banishes the dark,” goes “Summertime,” the opening song and title track. Bright horns add to the song’s sunny vibe, but the next verse acknowledges that this might all be a naïve dream and imagines a couple winding up “with the one that they abhor / In a distant hell-hole room, this third World War.” I appreciated the acknowledgement—my parents had divorced, and my mom’s remarriage was to an asshole, which was also coming into stark relief that summer. Static & Silence, like all the Sundays’ albums, didn’t fall into the trap of simplicity. Weirdly, this allowed me to sleep.
“Homeward,” the album’s second track, is much more low-key—“You’ve stolen my heart, and it hurts me to remember”—and the listener can’t be quite sure if the love is past or present, but it’s more likely past. Yet there are points in the song where the mood soars rather than pangs, and so we never really get a definitive answer. “It’s sort of just, like, memories,” Wheeler once told MTV’s 120 Minutes. “They’re not stories, our songs.” Meanwhile, “Folk Song,” with its gentle guitar fingerpicking and orchestral swells, offers a feeling of alternatingly running and strolling through tall summer fields on a calm, cloudless day.
“She” gives us warm, textured electric guitar; subtle, gorgeous harmonies; and beautiful building melodies about a girl at a disco who’s savoring the comfort of getting lost in a crowd under the glorious laser lights, enveloped by the sound. The feeling of comfort continues on “When I’m Thinking About You,” meandering and completely pure in its uncomplication, like wrapping your hands around a warm cup of tea. It’s a song about the security blanket of being in love, or the promising possibility of it—“Hope I’ll never wake / When I’m thinking about you.”
And yet on “I Can’t Wait,” we’re back to sleeplessness, and the sound of birds chirping accompany those bright horns making yet another appearance. Wheeler offers us verses about an antsy anxiety, a desire for her life to begin, or to at least change significantly. The next song, “Cry,” begins with another one of the album’s orchestral swells, and then there’s a sunny sadness to a story—or a memory—of a relationship past: “You gave me so much / And now it’s of the earth / And it makes me cry.” The matter-of-factness with which Wheeler repeats each “It makes me cry” somehow imbues the song with even more melancholy, like we’re witness to a person who’s fully accepted that she’s barren-earth bereft.
“Another Flavour” switches the mood again, with a distinctly driving rock feel. “Fashion, the timing’s all wrong / They taste another flavour / And pretty soon you’re gone.” It’s slinky and steely-cool, and we’re given a narrative of the narcissistic and ego-driven who will forever be chasing status and cheap thrills. In a similar vein, “Leave This City” deals with either the desire or the necessity to leave a city behind, one that doesn’t serve you anymore because either it’s changed too much, or you have. And then “Your Eyes” is another song about leaving, this time because of an annoying person—“I’d love to stay, but I think I’m off to Japan anyway.”
Finally, the last song, “Monochrome,” about the Apollo moon landing, is where we’re introduced to the “static and silence” that lends the album its title, evoking the quiet, monochromatic solitude of a man walking on the moon for a riveted, invisible audience. The album’s title, and the iconic scene it evokes, was prescient, for Static & Silence ended up being the Sundays’ final album, of the ‘90s—and ever.
Much ink has been devoted to “Whatever Happened To The Sundays,” with one writer, David Obuchowski, even toying with idea of flying to England and knocking at Wheeler and Gavurin’s door. But the short answer is that they longed for privacy, and that their anonymity was more important to them than their art. “We’re not interested in the flashiness of it all,” Wheeler said in one of their rare ’90s interviews. And then there was static…and silence.
LISTEN: